My winter internship at Paraform
I’m so excited to share Nicole’s story, as our first-ever intern at Paraform! Nicole joined us this winter to work on the product and engineering team, and her journey perfectly captures the excitement and challenges of building this company.
We continue to grow fast and we’re hiring—so if her experience resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you.
- Jeff
My winter internship at Paraform
Hey everyone! My name is Nicole, and I’m currently a student at Harvard studying computer science and economics. This winter, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at Paraform in both a product and engineering capacity.
Why Paraform?
I began this internship with a clear objective: to understand how a high-growth startup scales and iterates, particularly in an operationally complex marketplace like Paraform.
Having previously interned at larger companies like Snap and Stripe, I had gained invaluable insights into their engineering practices and operations. However, I was eager to explore the other end of the spectrum—working at a 10-person startup—to uncover why companies scale the way they do and how their approaches differ at such an early stage.
Paraform is a two-sided marketplace connecting companies with top recruiters to fill critical roles.
- For companies: Paraform helps businesses hire exceptional talent much faster than traditional recruiting. Companies like Palantir, Scale, and Hightouch trust Paraform to scale their teams efficiently by working with specialized recruiters for their toughest roles.
- For recruiters: Paraform provides access to high-quality clients and new revenue opportunities by enabling recruiters to place candidates in premium roles they might not access otherwise.
Paraform is growing and it’s growing fast because of the insane market opportunity. They have the kind of trajectory that made me excited to intern here.
Ironically, my journey with Paraform started when one of the recruiters on the platform reached out about a Founding Product Operations role. After deep diving into the company’s founding story and researching more into the market space, I knew I wanted to join the company.
I connected with the recruiter, pitched myself to the founders, John and Jeff, and the rest is history!
Day 1: Organized Chaos!
My first day at Paraform was a crash course in figuring things out on my own. I vividly remember Jeff sending me a couple of links and files on Slack and setting me off in the wild to get my codebase set up.
It was intimidating but also exhilarating. Within my first week, I focused my efforts on improving the current client onboarding flow, ideating several figma mockups, and shipping those frames after spotting the frictions. The fact that I could identify a problem, pitch a solution, and then execute on it immediately was addictive and I sought to do more.
Hats! Many hats!
At Paraform, I wore many hats—engineer, product strategist, designer, user researcher. I know, I know, everyone says they wear many hats, but I promise, my hat rack was legitimately full. My main focus was improving the client onboarding experience and to get a better understanding of the whole experience, I worked extensively with Linus, our Chief of Staff, as well as Product and Operations, Sales, and more!
One of the best parts of this internship was how much I got to tackle. Linus and Jeff let me own a lot of the work after I had proved myself during the first week. For example, towards the end of the second week, I suggested that I take some time to analyze the big-picture, the entire client onboarding workflow, and ideate optimizations. I reworked the whole system, critically analyzing how to (1) decrease current identity-swapping frictions, (2) reinforce user confidence with the product, and (3) limit communication context switching.
Accordingly, I proposed a new PRD with solutions to these frictions, drafted wireframe mock-ups for the new workflow, decided on the engineering frameworks and user journeys for the new system, and implemented them!
It felt great to see an idea turn into a solution (and so quickly). 🫡
Trust and ownership
One of the biggest takeaways from this experience is how important trust is at a startup. You earn trust by showing up, solving problems, and delivering results. It’s not always easy as an intern, where by nature of the title, you may begin with less trust in the first place, but when you continue to find opportunities to prove yourself, the team’s support is unmatched.
Ownership is another thing I’ll carry with me. One of my proudest moments was requesting time to take a step back from implementing features and analyzing the entire client onboarding experience holistically. From there, drafting a proposal to revise the entire experience supplementing the document with wireframes, user flows, case studies, and a specific implementation flow. It pushed me to improve how I write specs, interview users, and think critically about product decisions.
The team and culture
Paraform’s culture is what makes it stand out. The team might be small, but they’re ridiculously passionate about what they do. John and Jeff, the founders, are super approachable and always open to ideas. They’ve built an environment where everyone’s voice counts—even mine, the first Paraform intern ever. 😇
I loved getting to collaborate with people from different parts of the company, whether it was sales, operations, or marketing. It gave me a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together and what it takes to make a startup succeed.
Why Paraform will win
I’m leaving Paraform more convinced than ever that this company is onto something big. Their data moat is unlike anything I’ve seen before—the most up-to-date, granular insights about what companies want and what candidates offer. With AI reshaping industries so quickly, Paraform’s ability to leverage this data will be what sets it apart.
Final thoughts
Working at Paraform has made me excited about the possibility of building my own company someday, or joining a team that’s as passionate and driven as this one.
To anyone considering a startup internship at a team less than 10 people, I’d highly recommend it! You’ll learn more in a few weeks than you ever thought possible, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find a team like Paraform that inspires you every step of the way.
Thanks for the ride, Paraform!
If Nicole’s story resonates with you–reach out to us. We’re always looking for talented, driven people to join us.
Start your search today.
Speak with our team to learn more about how Paraform can help you fill your difficult positions